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In the first part of this series I noted that the major changes in Spidermonkey in 2014 were about EcmaScript 6.0 compliance, JavaScript performance and GC improvements. I also enumerated the major changes that happened starting from Firefox 29 till Firefox 31 related to Spidermonkey. If you haven’t read the first part yet, I would encourage you to do that first. In part two I will continue iterating the major changes from Firefox 32 till Firefox 34.

Firefox 32

Recover instructions

During the Firefox 32 release recover instructions were introduced. This adds the possibility to do more aggressive optimizations in IonMonkey. Before we couldn’t eliminate some instructions since the result was needed if we had to switch back to a lower compiler tier (bailout from IonMonkey to Baseline). This new infrastructure makes it possible to recover the needed result by adding instructions to this bailout path. As a result, we still have the needed results to bailout, but don’t have to keep a normally unused instruction in the code stream.

Internally there has been a lot of discussion around the regular expression engine used in Spidermonkey. We used to use yarr, which is the regular expression engine of Webkit. Though there were some issues here. We sometimes got wrong results, there were security issues and yarr hasn’t been updated in a while. As a result we switched to irregexp, the regular expression engine in v8 (the JS engine in Chrome). In the long run this helps by having a more up to date engine, which has jit to jit support and is more actively tested for security issues.

Another achievement that landed in Firefox 29 was the ability to keep ionmonkey jit code during GC. This required Type Inference changes. Type information (TI) was always cleared during GC and since ionmonkey code depends on it, the code became invalid and we had to throw the Ion code away. Since a few releases we can release Type information in chunks and since Firefox 32 we keep ionmonkey code that is active on the stack. This result in less bumps in performance during GC, since we don’t lose the Ion code.

Already going back to 2011 Generational GC was announced. But it took a lot of work before finally accomplishing this. In Firefox 29 exact rooting landed, which was a prerequisite. Now we finally use a more advanced GC algorithm to collect the memory and this also paves the way for even more advanced GC algorithms. This narrowed the performance gap we had on the Octane benchmark compared to V8, which already had Generational GC.

Firefox 33

8 bit strings

Since the first Spidermonkey release strings were always stored as a sequence of UTF-16 code units. So every string takes 16 bits per character. This is quite wasteful, since most of the strings don’t need the extended format and the characters actually fit nicely into 8 bits (Latin1 strings). From this release on strings will be stored in this smaller format when possible. The main idea was to decreases memory, but there were also some performance increases for string intensive tasks, since they now only need to operate over half the length.

Firefox 34

ES6 template strings

ES6 will introduce something called template strings. These template strings are surrounded by backticks ( ` ) and among others will allow to create multi-line strings, which weren’t possible before. Template strings also enable to embed expressions into strings without using concatenation. Support for this feature has been introduced in Firefox 34.

Some new optimization has been added regarding arrays. Before, when you copied an array, the JavaScript Engine had to copy every single item from the original array to the new array. Which can be an intensive operation for big arrays. In this release this pain has been decreased with the introduction of “Copy on write” arrays. In that case we only copy the content of an array when we start modifying the new array. That way we don’t need to allocate and copy the contents for arrays that get copied but not modified.

A second optimization was about inlining constant global names and constant name access from singleton scope objects. This optimization will help performance for people having constant variables defined in the global scope. Instead of reading the constants out of memory every time the constant will get embedded into the code, just like if you would have written that constant. So now it is possible to have a “var DEBUG = false” and everywhere you test for DEBUG it will get replaced with ‘false’ and that branch will be removed.

SIMD or Single Instruction Multiple Data makes it possible to execute the same operations on multiple inputs at the same time. Modern cpu’s already have support for this using 128-bits long vectors, but currently we don’t really have access to these speedups in JavaScript. SIMD.js is a proposition to expose this to JavaScript. In Firefox 34 experimental support (only available in Firefox Nightly builds) for these instructions in asm.js code were added. As a result making it possible to create code that can run up to 4x faster (Amdahl’s law) using SIMD. Now work is underway to fully optimize SIMD.js in all Ion-compiled JS. When this work is complete, and assuming continued progress in the standards committee, SIMD.js will be released to all Firefox users in a future version.